


weave the patterns for me and you

by dogworldchampion



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: F/F, these two are two thousand percent meant to be, y'all the finale Got Me okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-31
Updated: 2018-05-31
Packaged: 2019-05-16 13:42:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14812446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dogworldchampion/pseuds/dogworldchampion
Summary: She’d been sure she didn’t want anything, positive she was happy alone. But it felt like something out of a bad rom com, the way Alicia’s hair had bounced as she stepped out of the car, the way her eyes had crinkled at Rosa’s dumb snort. She’d been sure she didn’t want anything, but then someone agreed offhand that “all hats are dumb”. She’d been sure she didn’t want anything, but then she met Alicia.-----Rosa's not sure she's ready to make her move. But that's before one always-obnoxious, too-drunk, best-friend newlywed gets involved.





	weave the patterns for me and you

**Author's Note:**

> well i'm hugely out of practice but here u fucking go. my new faves now have some fic which is great - lmk what you think!! title from library magic, by the head and the heart

Rosa’s finger hovers over the “contact your driver” option. It’s for lost items, really. Does she count?

The cheap vinyl of the barstool below her sticks to the backs of her legs, despite the unseasonable chill in the air that’s wafting in through the door, constantly opening and closing the bar’s regular patrons stroll in for the evening. Her friends filter in with them, Hitchcock and Scully plopping on the seats to her right and immediately striking up a conversation with the foreign violinist. She can see Terry through the front window, on the phone telling his girls goodnight. She can feel the bartender behind her, shooting daggers at her back with his eyes, since she’s been sitting at his bar for almost a full half hour without having ordered anything, but she’s been busy. Terry had found Alicia’s contact information last time, had arranged for the second meet up, and she _definitely_ can’t ask him how he did it. So instead she’s been alternating between her internet browser and the Uber app, scrolling through options to locate previous drivers until she’d found this screen, buried five pages into her “Previous Trips” screen. That had been fifteen minutes ago. But she’s still gathering the courage to press the button.

She’d been sure she didn’t want anything, positive she was happy alone. But it felt like something out of a bad rom com, the way Alicia’s hair had bounced as she stepped out of the car, the way her eyes had crinkled at Rosa’s dumb snort. She’d been sure she didn’t want anything, but then _someone_ agreed offhand that “all hats are dumb”. She’d been sure she didn’t want anything, but then she met Alicia.

And then, around her, the volume of the room swells. She spares a glance away from her phone, up to the door, where Jake and Amy are entering. They’d followed from the precinct in a rented Mustang nearly identical to the one Amy had almost won five years before, complete with cans on the back and a _Just Married_ sign artfully decorated with her best calligraphy pens. Jake had teared up (for perhaps the twentieth time since he saw Charles’ handiwork) when he saw his wife’s latest surprise. She watches the Mustang’s headlights as the driver pulled off down the street to park and wait for the end of their “reception”, when he’d drive them out to a tiny cottage in Montauk. Amy’d worked overtime for _weeks_ to fund the surprise (and it’s possible Rosa had helped, shoving a crumpled check into Amy’s purse one evening with a muttered _Congrats, or whatever_ ).

And then her eyes wander back to her phone, still unlocked in her hand. The screen’s gone dim, but she can still make out the blank for her phone number. Her thumb twitches, moving an inch or two towards the text box as butterflies in her stomach give way to a herd of elephants, but then she can hear Gina laughing over Charles’ sobs of joy, so she shoves her phone deep into her pocket and turns to her captain for a glass of champagne. This can wait - she’s got newly married friends to get drunk.

The night is joyous. They finish off one bottle of champagne on the first toast, and then two more. Jake orders a round of kamikaze shots, announcing to full-on sobs from Charles that he and Amy were drunk on these during “Boinking Numero Uno” (Amy and Rosa share a glance and an eye roll at the butchered attempts at Spanish, and Amy’s drunk enough that it takes her a full 10 seconds to stop her new husband from giving a detailed account of the evening, much to Charles’ dismay). By the time everyone switches to beer, Captain Holt has been convinced by Jake to engage in one - just _one_ \- perfect rendition of the Robot. Her phone feels like it’s burning a hole in her pocket, but she resists the urge to check it.

That’s a lie. She unlocks it exactly four times to stare at the still-blank box where her number could go, could be sent to Alicia with a few brief taps.

Midnight finds her sprawled alone in a booth meant for six, one leg out while the other one kicks up and across the table. Captain Holt had vacated his spot on the bench across from her a few minutes before to join Terry by the DJ in a rendition of “Sweet Caroline”. From the corner of her eye, she can see Terry’s limbs flailing wildly, accompanied by Captain Holt’s baritone, delivered with all the grandiosity of a fabled opera singer belting his final note to an invisible crowd. There’s a part of her that can’t quite believe she’s not opening her camera, jumping to the dance floor to memorialize the moment for posterity (and for random morning briefings). But she can see Jake taking care of the photographic evidence from his vantage point in Amy’s lap. And her phone is otherwise occupied.

The Uber “Lost Items” screen is glaring so bright it’s hurting her eyes, but she can’t drag them away. The box is enticing, seemingly demanding that she just type in her phone number, just hit submit, but the way her thumbs shake a centimeter away from the screen seem to indicate that’s harder than it sounds. She’s known this number by heart since she was twenty-three, when she first got a black Razor flip phone that she would have sworn was the most badass thing she’d ever owned. But her eyebrows furrow and the corners of her mouth turn down into a frown that’s mostly frustration with just a hint of determination - why can’t she just _type_.

And then Alicia’s hair is flying through her mind’s eye and she’s lost all focus on the phone. She wonders if it would feel as soft as it looked. And then she bangs her head against the booth seat behind her because she’s _heard_ those kind of ramblings before - when a wasted Jake would whine about the way Amy’s bun caught the fluorescent office light. It was cheesy and gross then, and it’s cheesy and gross now.

She wonders if Alicia would think it was so cheesy. She really, really wants to find out.

But she’d had resolutions about taking time for herself and taking care of what she needed and resolving feelings about her parents and waiting for her friends to stop googling how to interact with her. She hadn’t been ready for _this_. Screw the universe and its stupid plans.

But Alicia’d thought it was cute when she _snorted_.

_Thwack_

The noise is so loud it makes her jump, twinging her hamstring as she yanks her leg back off the table in her haste to retreat from its source. Slowly, far more slowly than she’d care to admit, she identifies the sound as the sound of human skin slamming against the cheap vinyl of the booth. Another few seconds let her pick up on Jake’s moans coming from somewhere below the table across from her, nearly indistinguishable from the general din of the bar.

“Oomph...belly flopping in was...not my best entrance,” the disembodied voice across from her slurs. And then Jake sits up, slowly revealing a head of messy curls and an unbuttoned tuxedo shirt with _Property of Amy Santiago_ scrawled across his chest. His wife’s name is haphazardly crossed off, and as Jake rises further from below the table, a shaky _Charles Boyle_ scrawled just above his belly button becomes visible.

“You good?” Rosa’s eyes have already jumped back to her phone. Earlier in the night, she’d been more subtle with her preoccupation, hadn’t wanted to invite questions from annoying prying coworkers (hadn’t wanted to steal the spotlight on Jake and Amy’s night), but the last vestiges of restraint had left the room with the second round of shots of Fireball - now it was all she could do to listen to Jake’s response, eyes boring holes into her phone.

“I’m grrrreat, Rosa,” Jake laughs. “Just like Tony the Tiger--” and then, without warning, he’s turning around, rising up on his knees like a child at the dinner table, and raising his voice. “Hey, Captain Dad! Tony the Tiger! Another father figure!”

And then Captain Holt’s surprisingly lucid, “He’s also a cartoon, Peralta,” comes drifting back from the dance floor.

“But he played with real kids in the commercials!”

“That is insufficient qualification for the established parameters.” And with that, Holt is returning to what appears to be a very earnest conversation with a very teary Amy.

Jake settles back into his seat. “So, what were we saying?”

“We weren’t,” she replies, hoping a curt answer will send her friend back to the dance floor.

Her eyes are still trained on her screen, on the number keypad she’s managed to gather the nerve to pull up to type. She’s not usually this nervous, and there’s a part of her that hates how nervous she is to just press send. And yet, their brief interactions had stirred an undercurrent of... _something._ Something that scared her as much as it excited her. Something that felt far more permanent than she was ready for.

Had she been looking up, she would have noticed Jake’s unfocused eyes jump from the uncharacteristic worry on her face down to the bright screen of her phone, where he recognizes the Uber lost items screen from a million late nights, from a hundred lost wallets and a thousand dropped phones and at least four separate missing copies of _Die Hard_. She would have seen his eyes flit back and forth a few more times, piecing together the puzzle. She would have seen the sudden sobriety re-entering his features as he remembers story Terry had told so excitedly at the bar, the blush that had crept up his friend’s neck as she protested, the nearly-imperceptible fidgets that would have suggested to someone much more sober than Jake Peralta that his friend was more excited about her universe-selected Uber driver than she’d care to admit.

But Rosa’s too busy typing in the first digit of her phone number to see any of that. So she’s surprised when Jake asks, the slur in his voice suddenly nearly undetectable, “What’s up, Rosa?”

“Nothing.”

“It’s definitely _something_.”

“Like I said. Nothing.”

“Something like...a specific super-cute destiny-approved Uber driver?”

“What? How did--when--” Rosa sputters.

“Terry. I heard she had mermaid hair and she thought your snort was cute. _God_ , Rosa, everyone knows _I’m_ the only one who’s allowed to know about the snort!”

“I made no such promises. I’m pretty sure I only said ‘No one will ever hear that again,’.”

“Either way, a broken promise!” He holds his hand to his heart, throwing his head back in fake betrayal. But then, abruptly, he straightens and makes eye contact. “In all seriousness, you okay? Do I need to get Amy? This seems like some girl stuff--”

“Nah. I’m just trying to decide if i should give her my number, and if I do--”

“ _If_? Rosa, the gods of love have _spoken_! You can’t abandon your soulmate! Here - lemme--”

And then Jake is lunging across the table, his movements made clumsy by medically concerning combinations of alcoholic beverages.

“Soulmate? I never said--what-- _no_!” And Rosa’s sliding out of the bar, slamming her knee against the table leg in her haste to escape her more impulsive friend’s grabby hands. She knows he’d do it in a heartbeat, would save her all the agonizing and let her rebuild her cool, collected exterior. But she also knows that this has to be _her_ , can feel somewhere deep down that this means enough that she needs to do it herself.

“Rosaaaaa, don’t leeeaaave,” comes a whine from behind her as she turns to stalk away towards Amy, who’s far too happy to think of bothering Rosa.

“Don’t grab my phone.”

She turns to glare at her friend, to find him starfished on the table, his head hanging down over the edge to where her lap had been only moments before. His face, already red, is slowly growing redder as bursts of laughter shake his entire body. She resists the urge to break and laugh along with him. She’s already been way too emotionally vulnerable tonight.

Finally, he catches his breath, and when he sees she’s still staring at him, her face wiped entirely blank, he slides slowly back onto his own seat. She can hear the squeaking of his skin against plastic table as he moves, but he doesn’t seem to react to the sensation.

“I know...I know... _you_ should do it,” he concedes. “I just...you _should_ do it. I told you I was gonna die alone, and you told me to stop being a dum-dum and ask out my wife. So stop being a dum-dum so Amy has another wedding to plan. You know, she needs _projects._ ”

“Call me a dum-dum again and I’ll kick your ass.”

“Don’t break my ass!” he shouts, feigning alarm as he jumps out of the booth. “Amy _loves_ my ass!”

“Sure do, babe!” a shout comes from the dance floor.

“And I love you, Diaz,” he finishes over his shoulder as he walks away. “And you can’t even be mad at me! It’s my _wedding night_!”

“Love you too, Peralta,” she mutters, more to herself than to him.

“What’s that?” he calls back. She’d been sure he was out of earshot.

“Hate you.”

“Knew it!”

She takes one more deep breath, and then lets her fingers fly across her touch screen before she has time to second guess the move. Then her number is being sent off across the stratosphere. She can feel the nerves coursing through her veins, the adrenaline making her feet tap and her hands twitch, so she stalks off to the bar to buy her captain (and herself) another shot.

And somewhere across Brooklyn, a notification brightens a phone screen that’s been open on the “Contact Your Rider” page for the better part of two hours. Alicia smiles as she opens the message.


End file.
